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Cambodia - RPK Overprints
Cambodia’s ‘RPK’ Overprints of 1979-80
by Graham Shaw What do you do if your society has just emerged from more than three years of genocide and you are trying to reestablish a functioning administration, including a postal service? This was the issue facing those staff of the forerunner of today’s Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications (MPTC) in Cambodia who survived the murderous Khmer Rouge regime of 1975 to late-1978. Human, material and financial resources were extremely scarce for several years after the fall of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. It was only in April 1980 that postage stamps of the new régime were made available for public use in what was then called the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK), or ‘Republique Populaire Kampuchea’ – RPK – to use its French-language acronym. The staff of the forerunner to the modern day MPTC had to find a way of operating a postal service between the fall of the Khmer Rouge in December 1978 and the commencement of formal RPK stamp issues in April 1980 and, consequently, decided to use the stamps of previous regimes that were available and to overprint them manually with ‘RPK’, as shown in the following examples: http://articles.cambodiastamps.com/resources/RPK01.jpg The stamps shown above are the only known examples of a set issued on December 11, 1971 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of UNICEF (Scott 269-270; SG 309-310; Mi 312-313) with the manual handstamp of ‘RPK’ added and the double black line cancelling ‘Republique Khmere’ on each of the stamps. Such an approach would have saved time and resources whilst also allowing postal activities to take place and, from a more political perspective, affirm the commencement of the new régime that had considerable backing from Vietnam and some other Soviet-backed countries, including the USSR. At least one senior official of the modern-day MPTC who was working at the central post office immediately after the fall of the Khmer Rouge régime has confirmed that the RPK overprint was used for postal communications within Cambodia and for items sent abroad. However, as many collectors know, there are virtually no examples of such items of mail in existence. http://articles.cambodiastamps.com/r...6_RPK02-03.jpg The Stanley Gibbons (SG) catalogue states the following with regards to such overprints: “Various stamps of the previous regimes exist overprinted “RPK”. These were sold in Phnom Penh, mainly on covers cancelled with datestamps between 15 August 1979 and 22 June 1981. It is believed they were not available for postal use” (Source: Stanley Gibbons Stamp Catalogue, Part 21, South-East Asia, 4th Edition, p54). From personal e-mail communications with SG, it is apparent that they are simply following the entry made by the Michel catalogue that provides much more text on this period in contemporary Cambodian postal history. However, Michel provides more guidance to the collector as to which stamps of previous Cambodian régimes are known to have had the RPK overprinted added (Source: Michel, South and Southeast Asia, 2003, p564). The following is a list of known RPK overprints based on Michel plus others that I have identified to-date. It would be interesting to know from readers of this article if they have knowledge of any RPK overprints in addition to those listed in the following table; if so, please let me know at preferably with a scan of the individual stamp(s) if possible. http://articles.cambodiastamps.com/r...51_RPKTab1.jpg |
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